Today, the use of contact centers to provide support for products and services is a staple of many companies. The demand of providing high quality, yet low cost, support via contact centers is continuing to increase. Typically, companies have contact centers in various parts of the world in order to reduced costs and provide support twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (“24/7”). To meet the increasing demand for these types of services, a company may contract with a third party to provide contact center services during peak or overflow conditions. Other alternatives may be to provide the capability to transfer calls between different contact centers that are owned by the company.
One of the problems that companies and providers of contact center services face is that even though the disparate contact centers may use a common protocol, such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the networks between the contact centers likely use a different protocol. For example, the call may be transferred between the call centers on a public network such as the Public Switched Telephone Network, which uses non-SIP protocols. As a result, when a call is transferred between contact centers, information can be lost. For example, a customer may have initially entered personal information or information about the type of service that he/she is looking for. When a call is transferred between disparate contact centers, information like this can be lost due to protocol incompatibilities between the contact center and the service provider that interconnects the contact centers. This results in decreased customer satisfaction and increased costs. What is needed is a way to share information between contact centers when a call is transferred between the contact centers in this type of environment.